Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the
years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our
fellow citizens--Democrats and Republicans alike--to express
our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we
are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most
dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims
of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive
power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government
has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens
and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to
continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress
to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound
an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan
differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution
be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our
nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life
into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially
important to recall that for the last several years of his life,
Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands
of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by
the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and
effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take
him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to
destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery
that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign
of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the
inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped
to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act
(FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence
surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify
that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted
for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost
thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means
of according a level of protection for private citizens, while
permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news
that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch
has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the
last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone
calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the
United States." The New York Times reported that the President
decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program "without
search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic
intelligence collection."

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret,
the President went out of his way to reassure the American people
on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission
is required for any government spying on American citizens and
that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in
place.

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned
out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying
program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed
that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention
of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic
surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping
virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United
States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure
of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they
had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they
recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined
in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was
designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern
through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive
shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or
either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws
and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore
the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act
free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat
that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an
all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom
they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the
accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary,
in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether
hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced
the very definition of tyranny."

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, "On Common Sense"
ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's
alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that
"the law is king."

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy
and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us
operate within our constitutional structure, which means that
our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in
shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It
means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its
course and not executive officials operating in secret without
constraint.

The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions
will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes
of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge
that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks
the accretion of power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability
also helps our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently,
for example, we learned from recently classified declassified
documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized
the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information.
We now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq
War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. America
would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both
of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the rule
of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism
is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue
to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September
11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens
from harm.

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice
our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism.
In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped,
lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows,
the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform
their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its
constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access
to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly
difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability
is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government
of men and not laws.

The President's men have minced words about America's laws.
The Attorney General openly conceded that the "kind of surveillance"
we now know they have been conducting requires a court order
unless authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing,
and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it
does. Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the
surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to
use force against those who attacked us on September 11th.

This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting
into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing
facts. First, another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes
that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited
by existing law and that they consulted with some members of
Congress about changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they
were told this probably would not be possible. So how can they
now argue that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force
somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Second, when the
Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact
seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized
them to use military force domestically - and the Congress did
not agree. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern,
among others, made statements during the Authorization debate
clearly restating that that Authorization did not operate domestically.

When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him
all the power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly
assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization
was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote:
"To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely
to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress.
It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional
division of authority between President and Congress."

This is precisely the "disrespect" for the law that
the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case.

It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which
has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach
in the fabric of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied
in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger
pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply
troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties.

For example, the President has also declared that he has a
heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison
any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat
to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship,
the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even
to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake
and imprisoned the wrong person.

The President claims that he can imprison American citizens
indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant,
without notifying them about what charges have been filed against
them, and without informing their families that they have been
imprisoned.

At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously
unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in
ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now
been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries
around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being
tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have
been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison,
investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated
that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any
charges.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles
that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated
them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every
president since then - until now. These practices violate the
Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture,
not to mention our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to
kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for
imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes
in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques
for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these
new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador
to Uzbekistan - one of those nations with the worst reputations
for torture in its prisons - registered a complaint to his home
office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice:
"This material is useless - we are selling our souls for
dross. It is in fact positively harmful."

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under
our Constitution? If the answer is "yes" then under
the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts
that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the
inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own
declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing
the Executive Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized
powers: "If the President has commander-in-chief power to
commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction
slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to
contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply
troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive
Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying,
withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing
to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of
the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional
balance.

For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored
by John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President
declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the
right not to comply with it.

Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally
imprison American citizens without giving them access to review
by any tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President
engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from
providing meaningful content to the rights of its citizens.

A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
wrote that the Executive Branch's handling of one such case seemed
to involve the sudden abandonment of principle "at substantial
cost to the government's credibility before the courts."

As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power,
the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at
grave risk. The stakes for America's representative democracy
are far higher than has been generally recognized.

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power
restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of
our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.

For more than two centuries, America's freedoms have been
preserved in part by our founders' wise decision to separate
the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches,
each of which serves to check and balance the power of the other
two.

On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among
all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses
that create what are invariably labeled "constitutional
crises." These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain
times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we have
found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement
to live under the rule of law.

The principle alternative to democracy throughout history
has been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the
hands of a single strongman or small group who together exercise
that power without the informed consent of the governed.

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that
America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our
greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the
Civil War was "whether that nation, or any nation so conceived,
and so dedicated, can long endure," he was not only saving
our union but also was recognizing the fact that democracies
are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the
Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily,
what emerges in their place is another strongman regime.

There have of course been other periods of American history
when the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later
seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams,
passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence
and imprison critics and political opponents.

When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses
he said: "[The essential principles of our Government] form
the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided
our steps through an age of revolution and reformation... [S]hould
we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten
to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads
to peace, liberty and safety."

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas
corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to
those of the current administration were committed by President
Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and
Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII
marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the
hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious
COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced
by Dr. King and thousands of others.

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil
subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed
the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions
may be changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For
one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady
accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of
nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American
people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative
to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and
to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military
force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in
response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as
the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice
Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, "The accretion
of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however
slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the
restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion
of authority."

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something
new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing
upon which he has tried to place the country is going to "last
for the rest of our lives." So we are told that the conditions
of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to
justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping
and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up
and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it
for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the
privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at
the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These
techologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power
between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual
in ways both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes
is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons
of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise
the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility.
Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred
by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action
to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but
it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms
exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to
justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that
produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the
executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing
something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret.
This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal
theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration
of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of
the unitary executive but which is more accurately described
as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's
powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers
actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under
this theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief
or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary
or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications
of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role
as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can,
conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When
added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war,
the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far
into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional
design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful
Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied
by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign
policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority
into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort
to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to
intimidate and control.

This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence
dissenting views within the Executive Branch, to censor information
that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and
to demand conformity from all Executive Branch employees.

For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the
White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam
Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful
of losing promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials
in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's view that Dr.
King was closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI's
domestic intelligence division said that his effort to tell the
truth about King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and
his colleagues becoming isolated and pressured. "It was
evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out
on the street.... The men and I discussed how to get out of trouble.
To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These
men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in
school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money
on their homes, as they usually did. ... so they wanted another
memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were
in."

The Constitution's framers understood this dilemma as well,
as Alexander Hamilton put it, "a power over a man's support
is a power over his will." (Federalist No. 73)

Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI.
The false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the
same way, George Tenet's CIA eventually joined in endorsing a
manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda
and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell: "We are all capable of
believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we
are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as
to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to
carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check
on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against
solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably
leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability,
incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to
defend the Administration's eavesdropping on American citizens
by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11,
they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know that the Administration
did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well
before 9/11 and had available to them information that could
have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers.
And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this information,
it was never used to protect the American people.

It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by
the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by
reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often,
the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes
in the use of power it already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration
is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the
American system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting
unchecked power to this President means that the next President
will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may
be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this
is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with
what this President has done. If this President's attempt to
dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional
design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President
or some future President will be able, in the name of national
security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never
would have thought possible.

The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance
characterizes the relationship between this Administration and
the courts and the Congress.

In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would
serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches
of government observed their proper spheres of authority, observed
civil liberties and adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately,
the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability
of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies
out of its hands - notably those challenging its ability to detain
individuals without legal process -- by appointing judges who
will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support
of assaults on the independence of the third branch.

The President's decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault
on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established
the FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to
wiretap. Yet, to ensure that the court could not function as
a check on executive power, the President simply did not take
matters to it and did not let the court know that it was being
bypassed.

The President's judicial appointments are clearly designed
to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check
on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a
longtime supporter of a powerful executive - a supporter of the
so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the
unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or
not - and I do not - we must all agree that he will not vote
as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise,
Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion
of executive power through his support of judicial deference
to executive agency rulemaking.

And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial
independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That
assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate
to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the
minority to engage in extended debate of the President's judicial
nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to
curtail the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas
corpus to the pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration
has demonstrated its contempt for the judicial role and sought
to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn.

But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative
branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy
in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by
the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power.

I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in
the house, 8 years in the Senate and presided over the Senate
for 8 years as Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress
first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was elected to
Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate
in 1971.

The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the
one in which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators
and Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them
are here in this hall. But the legislative branch of government
under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely
subservient to the Executive Branch.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel
compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful
debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second
TV commercials.

There have now been two or three generations of congressmen
who don't really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's
and 80's, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I
participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire
- no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost
unknown in the Congress today.

The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance.
The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed
anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that
is not even available for Members of Congress to read before
they vote on it.

Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from
conference committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed
during floor consideration of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on
being the "greatest deliberative body in the world,"
meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful
vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously
asked: "Why is this chamber empty?"

In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely
competitive election contest every two years is typically less
than a dozen out of 435.

And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key
to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on
the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the
case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled
by the incumbent president and his political organization.

So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration
is further limited when the same party controls both Congress
and the Executive Branch.

The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress'
role, and often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the
surrender of its own power.

Look for example at the Congressional role in "overseeing"
this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face
seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President
says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he
talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and
Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House
and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were
not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence
committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney
and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these
men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty
Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans
in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to
protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional
program.

Moreover, in the Congress as a whole-both House and Senate-the
enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with
the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate,
has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized
corruption.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that
threatens the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.

It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily
explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent
the dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens
a radical transformation of the American system.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress
today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution.
Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent
and co-equal branch of government you're supposed to be.

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse
must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand
the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by
the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are-collectively-still the key to the survival
of America's democracy. We-as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we
here"-must examine our own role as citizens in allowing
and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our
democracy.

Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry is the
only true repository of the public will."

The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was
based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves
and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government.
This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle
articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: "All
just power is derived from the consent of the governed."

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system
that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread
participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers
were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they
represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded
the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers
recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the
people - in their various States - that refused to confirm the
result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made
integral to the document sent forward for ratification.

And it is "We the people" who must now find once
again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving
our Constitution.

And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The
age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since
been replaced by television - a distracting and absorbing medium
which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs
and educates.

Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable
in a new way to our dilemma today: "We must disenthrall
ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted
television as their principal source of information. Its dominance
has become so extensive that virtually all significant political
communication now takes place within the confines of flickering
30-second television advertisements.

And the political economy supported by these short but expensive
television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America's
first century as those politics were different from the feudalism
which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the
Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system
today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control
the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome
of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.

The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain
the secrecy of its operations. After all, the other branches
can't check an abuse of power if they don't know it is happening.

For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade
Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many
in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design
of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the
basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and
prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought
from the principal administration expert who had compiled information
showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates
were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers
given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically,
the entire initiative is now collapsing- all over the country-
with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to
major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic
consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political
appointee in the White House who had no scientific training.
And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming
in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press
and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the
Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global
warming.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control
the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language
and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and
drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the
public interest. As President Eisenhower said, "Any who
act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and
suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse
and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis
once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed
in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The
very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing
the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors
when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world
more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens
of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and
annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more
danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when
our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed
so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful
of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and
now it is up to us to do the same.

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right
not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate
steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present
danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the
Executive Branch and the President's apparent belief that he
need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, "The President
has dared the American people to do something about it. For the
sake of the Constitution, I hope they will."

A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney
General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents
him from investigating what many believe are serious violations
of law by the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of
how an independent investigation by a special counsel with integrity
can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald
has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing
allegations that the Executive Branch has violated other laws.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should
support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the
appointment of a special counsel to pursue the criminal issues
raised by warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President.

Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be
established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence
of wrongdoing -- especially where it involves the abuse of Executive
Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive-and
not just superficial-hearings into these serious allegations
of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they
should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive
Branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act
should, under no circumstances be granted, unless and until there
are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution
and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses
that have so recently been revealed.

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the
government with access to private information concerning the
communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately
cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal
invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for
the restoration of the health of our democracy.

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet
be protected against either the encroachment of government or
the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future
of our democracy depends on it.

I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason
for hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that
America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of
our democracy will be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly
than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, "Perhaps a new spirit is rising
among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that
our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we
are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems
so close around us."

NEW: Gore Assails Domestic
Wiretapping Program Former Vice President: Bush
'Repeatedly
WASHINGTON - Former Vice President Al
Gore asserted Monday that President Bush
repeatedly and persistently broke the law
by eavesdropping on Americans without a
court warrant and called for a federal investigation of
the practice.

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